Regardless of what black Americans think, the police departments that protect and serve their communities should be defunded immediately. At least that is the latest propaganda being peddled in a bizarre new campaign by the far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a radical organization literally founded by members of the Communist Party USA.

According to the ACLU’s new campaign, American police are and always have been racist yahoos brutally oppressing minority communities. Reforms, investigations, firings, and other policy changes will not suffice. Instead, America’s thousands of local police departments must be defunded as soon as possible, with the “savings” being “invested” into priorities established by the ACLU.

In a series of videos purporting to document the last “100 years of history” surrounding policing in America, the far-left group argues that “policing still acts as an occupying force in communities of color.” And so, instead of public funding for police to investigate, punish, and prevent crime, that money should go to “black and brown communities,” the organization said.

A petition that goes with the campaign, which has been signed by almost 150,000 people as of this writing, displays hatred and dishonesty toward America’s police officers — many of whom put their lives on the line to protect their communities. And yet, from the ACLU’s rhetoric, American cops might as well be a pack of wild invaders led by Genghis Khan.

“The policing institutions in our country are deeply entrenched in racism and brutality, and we cannot allow it to continue,” the petition reads. “These inherently systemic issues require immediate and permanent solutions. That requires a bold reimagining of the role police play in our society: It is time to divest from law enforcement and reinvest in the Black and Brown communities [sic] they unjustly target.”

As usual, “defunding police” hysteria by guilt-ridden white liberals and agenda-driven hate-mongers such as those running the ACLU is portrayed as merely a benevolent effort to “help” black people who supposedly cannot help themselves. The narrative is very much akin to liberal campaigns to “save the whales” or “save the baby seals.”

Ironically, though, polling data show that black Americans are overwhelming against defunding the police departments that protect their communities from violent criminals. In fact, according to a Gallup survey released in August 2020 — right at the height of the media and “Black Lives Matter” demonization campaign against supposedly “racist” police — more than eight in ten black Americans wanted the same or a greater police presence.

In short, despite its supposed devotion to “democracy,” the ACLU’s radical agenda to defund police would require ignoring the wishes of the very black Americans it pretends to be concerned about. In fact, the scheme would require that a tiny, fringe minority of radicals be allowed to impose unpopular policy on the rest of the community using undemocratic means.

The ACLU’s “sweeping three-part formula” includes, among other elements, handcuffing the police, “prohibiting” them from enforcing laws against crimes that the ACLU determines are “non-dangerous” using fines or arrest. The money saved by eviscerating police will be “reinvested” into unspecified “alternatives to policing” that will supposedly help communities “thrive.”

Finally, for those “rare instances in which police officers do interact with community members” under the new policing regime, the ACLU proposes to implement “common-sense, iron-clad legal constraints” against police and “protections” for those law-enforcement interacts with. Of course, the U.S. Constitution and all 50 state constitutions already contain such protections.

To advance its dangerous anti-police narrative, the ACLU uses deception, lies, and half-truths. The very first video is based on a fraudulent narrative, painting Rodney King — a wife beater who pleaded guilty to armed robbery — as an innocent victim of racist cops. The fact that he charged at police while intoxicated after a dangerous high-speed chase reaching almost 120 mph is never mentioned.

Even the quote from the official LA commission report about the incident is used in a deceptive manner. When the narrator cited the commission’s mention of “racism and bias within the Los Angeles Police Department,” he failed mention that it was based on a survey that found just one fourth of officers in the department thought racism or bias existed at all in the department. In other words, more than 75 percent of officers did not believe racism existed.

But this was never about racism. The communist movement in the United States — backed for generations by the mass-murdering regime enslaving the Soviet Union — has been waging war on American police for almost a century now. In fact, in an official 1961 report headlined “Communist Plot Against the Free World Police,” the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate outlined the nature of the threat.

Among other concerns, it was revealed that communist agents across the West were working to undermine local police so that law-enforcement could be nationalized and federalized. Communists directed by Soviet intelligence had a special focus on the United States. The Judiciary Committee also detailed some of the methods, including formation of mobs to attack police and then demonizing the officers.

Considering the history of the ACLU, its latest salvo in its war on America’s police should come as no surprise. Among the charter members of the ACLU at its founding were numerous senior Communist Party officials including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Louis Budenz, and even eventual Communist Party USA General-Secretary William Z. Foster.

ACLU Executive Director Roger Baldwin, who led the group from 1920 to 1950 and visited the USSR twice, was proud of his communist leanings. “I am for socialism,” he famously wrote. “I seek social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal…. I don’t regret being part of the communist tactic. I knew what I was doing. I was not an innocent liberal.”

American officials have known this for decades. In 1948, the California Senate Fact Finding Committee on Un-American Activities released a report on it. “The ACLU may be definitely classified as a Communist front or transmission belt organization,” the committee said on page 107 of its 1948 report. “At least 90 percent of its efforts are on behalf of Communists who come in conflict with the law.”

Stripping American communities of their police forces would be a recipe for chaos, especially in minority communities. But the American people, including black Americans, have made it abundantly clear that they are vehemently opposed to such an idiotic plan.

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Written by Paul Kengor

Last week I looked at the history of the original socialists and at what Pope Francis aptly termed their “ideological colonization” of the family and marriage, work that started in the 19th century with the likes of Robert Owen, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Whether they know it or not, today’s nature-redefiners — who target the family or marriage or sexuality or gender — are standing on the shoulders of those 19th century ideologues, utopians who sought to replace the natural-traditional-Biblical family with their own conceptions. Socialism’s new strategies are certainly different from the old, but the rebellion against God and His absolutes remains the same.

In recent decades, eager socialists in the West have been ripping down the traditional family from Scandinavia to Ireland. The spectacle in Ireland was especially disturbing. It was one of the few places where marriage was redefined not by unhinged judges or a left-wing Parliament but by national referendum in a one-time Catholic country where the majority no longer cares about the 2,000-year Christian teaching on the sanctity of marriage. Ireland’s citizenry once led the way in sending priests and nuns to the English-speaking world. Today the Irish take the lead as angry scoffers at their ancestors’ faith.

Socialism’s Bait and Switch

The contemporary left’s effort to fundamentally transform the family has been relentless, opportunistic and multi-faceted. Even in countries like Italy and France, where the populace was not demanding same-sex marriage, socialist politicians are hell-bent on giving it to them anyway.

Under the leadership of socialist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Italy just approved same-sex civil unions, which everyone in the country understands as the Italian left’s mere first step to securing same-sex marriage and adoption of children as well. Still, even there we can mainly blame the electorate. Italian citizens, after all, voted for the socialists. They did so not because they wanted the left’s wider cultural-social agenda. They voted for cradle-to-grave freebies and never-ending pensions from the nanny state, not for the redefinition of family and marriage.

But sadly, what they do not realize (or tolerate as a trade-off for socialism’s wondrous freebies) is that when you vote for the left for economic reasons you inevitably also get its cultural-social agenda — which undermines the natural-traditional-biblical family. If you are addicted to the welfare the socialist doctor provides, then you also accept his cultural brew. Such is the plight of the welfare junkie addicted to the state’s largesse.

Thus, Italians en masse remain sympathetic to Pope Francis and his appeals against same-sex marriage and the “demon” of gender ideology. Nonetheless, when you hold out your hands for “free” government goodies, among the candy in the socialist bag is family redefinition. You want the fat pension? Okay, fine, but you also must give a thumbs-up to gay unions.

Time to pay the socialist piper, kiddies.

Obama and the Democratic Socialists of America

As for America, our situation is not wildly different. We are getting an aggressive “LGBTQ” political-cultural agenda under Barack Obama’s expansive left-wing umbrella of “fundamental transformation.” That was not what the rank-and-file Obama voter was expecting in November 2008. Certainly, the record number of millions of African-Americans (historically the most religious voting demographic in the country) who enthusiastically voted for Obama did so for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with transgender bathroom edicts. But alas, the fundamental transformation they are getting is a White House literally illuminated in the rainbow colors of the gay-rights movement.

We should not delude ourselves that Barack Obama, the most far-left president we have ever had, is not a socialist of some sort. As Stanley Kurtz showed several years ago, we know that Obama was actually for a time in the 1990s a member of the socialist New Party. (For extended analysis, see my book on Obama’s long-time mentor, The Communist.) If Obama remains a socialist, he remains one from a cultural perspective as much as an economic one.

But moving away from Obama, look at the platforms of the dominant socialists in America today when it comes to family-sexuality issues.

The website of the influential Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is quite open about its social goals. Its “About DSA” section lists among its three planks the broad objective of seeking to “restructure gender and cultural relationships.” The DSA has been carrying the rainbow flag for quite some time. It passed a resolution at the annual convention in November 2011:

DSA calls for the legalization of same-sex marriages in all the States and Territories of the United States of America; the enactment of anti-discrimination laws in housing, jobs, education, and health care; and the repeal of state sodomy laws and anti-lesbian and gay restrictions.

That was merely point one in a very comprehensive seven-point statement on “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Rights” that also included (among other things) “making public schools safe and bias-free for LGBTQ students, defending their free speech in school and allowing students to start gay-straight alliance clubs” and advancing “the rights of LGBTQ people to parent.” Very tellingly, point four in the DSA statement insisted: “DSA advocates for local and federal non-discrimination laws and insists that religious beliefs cannot be used to justify bias.”

For the record, the objectives of the DSA statement are almost identical to those of Socialist Party USA, whose official platform includes a statement pledging, “We are committed to confronting the heterosexism that provides the fertile ground for homophobic violence, and support all efforts toward fostering understanding and cooperation among persons and groups of differing sexual orientations.”

And if you want to go further left still, John Bachtell, Communist Party USA chair, recently writing in People’s World (successor to the Daily Worker), called for a socialist-communist-progressive-liberal-Democrat coalition, coalescing around Bernie Sanders, to “fight uncompromisingly against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia.”

Marx and Engels: Proud Papas

What would Marx and Engels have thought about their name and ideology being invoked in the modern left’s crusade against “transphobia?” Well, they would have been shocked speechless. But they surely would have appreciated how their left-wing descendants found such handy tools to undermine the traditional family. Today’s leftists may not succeed in a total “abolition of the family” (to borrow from the phrase in The Communist Manifesto), but they are certainly succeeding in fundamentally transforming the institution.

Once upon a time, when we worried about socialists undermining the family, our concern was the economic destitution wrought by the ideology and its counterfactual theories about property and wealth confiscation and redistribution. In the old days, socialists harmed the family by leaving a dad jobless or the household scratching for income in a decimated economy. Today, we need to widen our horizon of socialism’s destructive possibilities. Modern socialists are not thinking merely about managing the state’s economic means of production; they are seeking to completely manage and revamp society’s very understanding of the human family itself.

They are, in short, fundamental transformers not just economically but culturally. And they operate a giant wrecking ball that is wreaking havoc in millions of lives.

This article was originally posted at the Stream.org